The heart of the original Hewlett Packard company, Agilent, is spinning off its semiconductor in a major restructuring. It's also agreed to sell its stake in its LED joint venture Lumileds to JV partner Philips. More divestments will follow, as Agilent said it will seek buyers for its system on a chip and memory testing businesses next year. Agilent itself was itself spun off from HP five years ago.

The race is on to apply machine learning to biology. The starting gun was fired in 2002 when research company Correlogic stunned the medical world with the announcement of a vastly improved test for detecting ovarian cancer. The new test was simple - a few drops of blood are all that's required - yet reliable. What made it truly remarkable was that the test was discovered by machine. This formed a key theme at this month's International Joint Conference in AI (IJCAI) at Edinburgh.

A Vanderbilt University research squad has illustrated what the Victorians and Mary Whitehouse knew all along: that smut sends you blind, albeit temporarily. The same apparently applies to blood and guts images, although of course eyeballing snaps of carnage does not carry the same penalty of eternal damnation as ogling smut.

FoTW
We don't get many like this. This is what is known as a quality flame. It has nearly everything: barely constrained anger, personal insults, accusations of drug use, unnecessary exclamation marks, capitalisation...we could go on.

The Microsoft Plug-and-Play vulnerability exploited by the ZoTob worm has been harnessed to create an IRC bot. IRCBot-ES uses the vulnerability to spread instead of more common vectors such as Windows RPC security vulns.

Scientists at the University of Edinburgh have announced the successful creation - in conjunction with the University of Milan - of nerve stems cells, hailing the breakthrough as a great leap towards possible treatments for diseases such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.

An investigation into the illegal net trade in live animals and animal products has revealed that those with sufficient cash can purchase anything from a gorilla to a Siberian tiger or - if they sound like a bit of a handful - elephant tusks or a stuffed peregrine falcon.

Australian scientists have discovered that crocodiles - as well as boasting a fine set of teeth and a nice line in drowning and subsequently consuming buffalo - have a highly robust immune system capable of seeing off some penicillin-resistant bacteria.

Adware maker 180solutions has sued seven former distributors for using networks of compromised computers to surreptitiously install its software on users' PCs. The complaint, filed in King County Superior Court, names defendants Eric de Vogt of the Netherlands, Jesse Donohue of Australia, Khalil Halel of Lebanon, Imran Patel of the UK, Zarox Souchi of Canada, Youri Van Den Berg of the Netherlands and Anton Zagar of Slovenia.

Review
Toshiba has been designing and manufacturing notebooks for 20 years, starting with the T110 in 1985, which weighed in at over 7kg, had a battery life of 60m and possessed a green screen. To celebrate, the company has chosen to revive one of its older ultraportable lines, in the form of the Toshiba Libretto U100. Initially there will be this one model but if it proves popular, the line will be expanded, writes Stephen Patrick.

A New Jersey teenager was last week sentenced to five years in youth detention for taking part in a denial of service for hire scam. Jasmine Singh, 17, pleaded guilty to two counts of computer theft over attacks on online sporting goods stores said to have cost victims $1.5m. Judge Frederick DeVesa in Superior Court, New Brunswick also ordered Singh to pay $35,000 compensation.

The controversial .xxx TLD domain has been delayed after the chairman of ICANN's Government Advisory Committee (GAC), Mohamed Sharil Tarmizi reacted to political and public pressure to ask for a postponment in implementing of the cyberporn ghetto.

Letters
News that the cheque will be extinct by 2025 has caused much mirth among our Scandinavian and Alpine cousins. In fact, we think they are laughing and pointing at us as though we were an exhibit in a museum. Still, other people have thought of valid reasons to keep the cheque going.

Review
If Sun gets very serious about Solaris 10 on x86 and the Open Solaris project that it hopes will nourish it, Linux vendors had better get very worried. That's because, in the many areas where Linux is miles ahead of Solaris, Sun stands a good chance of catching up quickly if it has the will, whereas in the many areas where Solaris is miles ahead, the Linux community will be hard pressed to narrow the gap. In this series of articles, we take a careful look at Solaris x86, examining the good, the bad, and the ugly, with Linux as our chief point of reference.